By Cole McInerney
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I was seated
in the death black limousine
at the back.
Thirteen, sobbing.
Bagpipes played
the bagpipe songs.
Timely snow
covered our coats.
Our grandmother
mother
wife
stranger
lowered
into the ground.…
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By Bob Haynes
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After my checkup, hatchlings sitting on a broken
bough startle at the form I’ve taken.
Who’s to say what cures & what chafes?
So far, my generation has
discovered Higgs bosons, gravitons, quarks—
nuclear folly & deterrents.
The hatchings nibble at clippings of timothy
while I can still hear the nurse
tugging a ticker-tape of arrhythmias.
If wishing could reprieve
bones, I’d retrieve that echo through all those
lifetimes when I climbed a trellis
the full width of the patio
to replace a fallen fledgling.
If a hint might reawaken
the wilder beast with whom I’m unfinished
one or two lifetimes from now, I’m curious
how (or if) the bird will sing
the encore of my heartbeat.
– Bob Haynes
Author’s Note: This poem was written in 2022, which was not only a year of a continuing pandemic but also a year of personal loss.…
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By Krysten Ross
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“Barren,”
says the doctor and there it is
the monitored hope
of a caught firefly in the mason jar of my womb:
a crescendo to its emptiness
breathing and gasping in
only pockets of air
through a pin-pricked eggshell thin lid.
– Krysten Ross
Author’s Note: In early 2021, I was having a check-up with my doctor when I raised concerns about my health. After reviewing my symptoms, the doctor told me quite matter-of-factly that I may never have children. My heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach when I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. During one of the ultrasound tests, I looked at the monitor when the sonographer left the room. The cysts on my ovaries lit up the screen like a million fireflies in the night.…
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By Jay Dye
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★★★☆☆
Wait time was too long. I stood around for hours, but never got what I wanted.
★★★★★
This is it. The real deal. She will peel apart her ribcage and let you see her naked heart. She hides nothing; exposes everything, even the ugliest parts, the intestines, blood, rotten. All of it is on the page. (All of it.)
★☆☆☆☆
has never been to the bottom of the ocean. does not know what it is to truly cry. can not comprehend loss. mourns but is never mourned.
★★☆☆☆
Doesn’t make sense. Why can’t life be understood? Some of us want to know why we are here. No answers, just questions!
★★★★☆
at dawn she walked the shore to greet me in a hug. she was smiling.…
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By Brian Wallace Baker
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Children search clouds
for bunnies and puppy dogs
but find only
stampedes of thundering water
buffalo, spooked
and hale horned, tsunamis
of great whites foaming
at the mouth.
Air coils
around their ankles
like snakes poised
to swallow whole.
By Haro Lee
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How a love story begins: that bitch
pushed your name to me,
a perfect paper sailboat, and the
first thing I said to you was
“That’s what I want to name my son.”
The end of the story goes like this:
Summer has tipped students out the
library, we are the only two left
on the basement floor. You will stay here
shelving books into their tombs.
In these remains, we buckle,
my knuckles grip-locking you.
This is how to say goodbye.
Like expelled angels falling from the sky.
Biceps tremble into my shoulders so tight,
may the blades weld into wings.
May I fly to you every night,
to resume. On our way to 7-Eleven and
pause over every star. To bicker over
who packs the bowl, who pays for the food.…
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By Ava Chen
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Tomorrow night, I cry as activity instead of catharsis.
This little bloodstained duvet twisted between my bruises.
Why are you still here? A bleached monochrome dance
I bore into at every cusp between late night and early
morning. The Notes app dream journal woven in
half-delirium, half-life, but within is what may have
truly passed, if there is such a thing. Such is the pied
piper of evening sky: are the transient pinpricks above
liminal windshield dust or celestial negative space?
This is why I shake Descartes’ hand; a pretense.
Grip his palms gurney-white as my blackened soles
demarcate love from convenience; dissonance from
flesh. A too-sterile chain of suspicion stretches half a
link before evanescing amorphous, bits of iron and
thought drifting upwards my guttural ceiling light.…
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